About Us

Solid State Pros (SSP) started in 2014 as a hands-on product consultancy, and in our first years we partnered with dozens of founders to design, build, and ship brands and MVPs for many startups and growing companies. In 2018, the company made a deliberate pivot: away from volume client services and toward the harder, longer game of original R&D — the deep technical questions in computing, hardware, and AI that don't fit inside anyone's quarterly roadmap. Today, SSP runs both engines side by side: an independent open research lab, and a senior practice that brings that same depth to enterprise problems.

Headquartered in the Pacific Northwest with a studio in Blaine WA (USA) and another studio in Vancouver BC (Canada), with access to remote peers coast to coast and around the globe.

We're not a bench of hundreds, and that's the point. SSP is a small core of veteran builders and operators — people who've shipped at Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, lululemon, Zoom, and beyond — plus a trusted network of top-shelf industry professionals we bring into engagements as the work demands. You never get a junior team learning on your dime. You get exactly the senior people your problem needs, and nobody else.

There are four ways to work with us:

Hire an elite team. Point a small, senior squad at your hardest problem — AI to production, deep-tech engineering, transformation leadership — and trust it to ship.
Hire a solo expert. Fill one critical seat with a proven senior individual who slots straight into your organization from day one.
Partner with us. Build something together: sponsored research, product co-development, pilots, and institutional collaborations with shared upside.
Fund the research. Back the Greenforest R&D program and help open research exist — every result published, for everyone.

The people below are where it all starts. Meet the core team, and some of the professionals we work with.

Expert Software/Hardware Engineer & Inventor

Brian is a gifted hardware/software systems engineer and inventor who ships production infrastructure for satellite networks by day and is quietly reinventing how computers are built by night and weekends. He is working to scale computation past the von Neumann bottleneck, with an original model of composable 'engines' and a new Cartilage hardware substrate. He is inventing and building the hard infrastructure other systems quietly run on — and, underneath it all, a new foundation for computing itself.

20+ years shipping hard systems, from remote access and real-time distributed platforms to Amazon's Leo (Project Kuiper) satellite network.
Rare range from full-stack to silicon: FPGA/RF, Rust and C++, LLMs, and modern web.
Inventor of a new model of computation and Cartilage, a hardware substrate that scales cleanly — plus a snap-together tile kit that puts a working computer on a tabletop.

Email: brian@solidstatepros.com

Connect: LinkedIn

Ways to Work with Brian:

When a project has a strange technical boundary and needs inspection before it becomes expensive.

Technical boundary review: Send an artifact, design, claim, or failure point. He will identify what looks real, what is speculative, where the hidden global assumption may be, and what evidence would make it stronger.
Inspectable prototype review: For FPGA, circuit, AI, radio, semiconductor, programmable-matter, or browser-native computation demos where the visible artifact has to match the claimed behavior.
Research architecture: For teams trying to make a computational system more local, visible, reproducible, or trustable before committing to a larger implementation path.
Proof and artifact pages: For technical teams that need to explain what was checked, what was generated, what was hand-authored, what remains speculative, and what a stranger can audit without trusting the author.
Technical Critique: More info here Send Brian a hard boundary in your computational system. He will tell you what looks real, what looks speculative, what evidence is missing, and which prior-art or measurement questions he would check before believing the claim.

Expert Program, Product, Strategy, and AI Transformation Leader

Steve is the hands-on leader enterprises bring in when AI has to move from slide decks to production. Across two decades leading global programs for Fortune 100, he's turned billion-dollar ambitions into systems that ship, scale, and get used — most recently leading agentic AI that collapsed multi-hour compliance work into minutes. He's been tracking where AI is headed since the early 00s, which is why he tends to see the next move before the market names it. He has extensive experience not only in large enterprise, but also in SMB and startups.

20+ years leading global technology and product marketing programs for large companies including lululemon, Amazon, Microsoft, Ingram Micro, Capital One, Cargill, Kaiser Permanente, and lululemon, including enterprise transformations and rollouts spanning 67 countries and millions of connected devices.
Builds and lands the agentic AI, LLM, and automation systems most enterprises are still stuck piloting, turning multi-hour workflows into minutes and pilots into measurable ROI.
A transformation leader who has led enterprises through every wave from web and mobile to cloud, agile, and AI, aligning teams behind a shared plan and turning strategy into execution, governance, and real adoption.

Email: steve@solidstatepros.com

Connect: LinkedIn

Fractional Head of Operations & People

Apollo is the operator who makes organizations actually run. With two decades spanning global agency HR at Publicis Groupe and Saatchi & Saatchi, seven years as a General Manager at Robert Half, and eight-plus years running operations for Solid State Pros, he covers the entire back-of-house of a business — people, contracts, partnerships, and the books — so builders can build.

Two decades in operations, HR, and recruiting, from global agencies (Publicis Groupe, Saatchi & Saatchi) to general management at Robert Half, one of the world's largest talent firms.
Full-stack business operations: recruiting and people ops, contract management, partnerships and alliances, CRM administration, and accounting through tax.
The connective tissue of a company — brings people together, keeps commitments visible, and turns organizational chaos into a machine that runs.

Email: apollo@solidstatepros.com

Connect: LinkedIn

"Looking to bring us onto your team? → Hire Us.

Want to back the open research with no strings? → Greenforest R&D Fund.

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